Recent years have witnessed the development and expansion of power generating systems that utilize hitherto-underused natural energy in an effort to make efficient use of energy resources. One such system utilizing natural energy is a solar heat power generating system.
Generally, the solar heat power generating system converts the radiant heat of the sun collected by a heat collector into sensible heat of heating media such as oil, stores the sensible heat thus obtained in a thermal storage device, and feeds the stored heat to an evaporator to generate steam that drives a steam turbine to generate electric power. One such system configuration is described in Patent Literature 1, for example. Also, Patent Literature 2 describes an example whereby the heat collected into the thermal storage device is not fed to the evaporator but supplied to heat the feed water to the evaporator.